(The following article by Dan Stockman was posted on the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette website on July 23.)
FORT WAYNE, Ind. — If you could locate your home anywhere, would you place it next to a tank of hazardous materials? What if that material was on wheels and rolled by your home at up to 40 mph?
In Fort Wayne, nearly 36,000 people live within a few blocks of the busy railroad lines that cross the city – railroads that each year carry millions of tons of poisonous gas, corrosive acids and explosives past homes, businesses, schools and child-care centers. An additional 10,000 live close enough to the busy tracks in New Haven to be in danger.
In fact, of the thousands of railcars that roll through the city each year, about one in 20 is carrying hazardous materials, according to federal statistics. But aside from standing near the tracks and logging ID numbers on railcars – assuming you know how to interpret those numbers – finding out what is in those cars is nearly impossible.
“For security reasons, we don’t discuss that with the media,” Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband said. “We do provide all that information to the (local emergency planning committee) on request.”
Local officials say they get general information about the types of materials that generally move through the city but not specific information on how much or when.
Someone wanting to choose a school or a home, then, is left to trust that whatever is being hauled nearby will not spill or leak and would not find out what that material was unless something happened.
Recently, a train rumbled down the tracks over Broadway with tank cars whose placards identified them as carrying highly flammable alcohol and liquids such as diesel or fuel oil. The elevated tracks sit between a grocery store and a child-care center and are lined by hundreds of homes. A derailment and fire could imperil hundreds before they even knew what had happened.
Another train carried refrigerated carbon dioxide through the city in its black tank car. Refrigerated carbon dioxide, according to a federal guidebook, can cause dizziness or asphyxia if inhaled, and the containers not only can explode if heated, but also a rupture can cause the tank to rocket, where the escaping gas blasts the tank car through the air.
On a recent Friday, a train rumbled through downtown and past the homes in the East Central neighborhood carrying thousands of gallons of alcohol, plus a tank car full of butane, isobutene or propane. A federal guidebook calls the gases “extremely flammable” and says they can form explosive mixtures in the air.
The Journal Gazette identified the chemicals using the federal Emergency Response Guidebook from the U.S. Department of Transportation. But the people who live just feet from the tracks are not told what dangers are rumbling past.
“We would leave (public information) up to the public officials, since ultimately they’re the ones responsible for public safety, to let them decide what should be shared with the public,” Husband said.
Mayor Graham Richard said residents have a right to know what dangers they’re facing.
“I come down in this case on the side of encouraging higher levels of knowledge,” Richard said, “and the ability to make decisions based on facts.”
Should the public know?
The federal response to the issue of dangerous cargoes was a proposal that would have increased secrecy: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security proposed removing the placards from railcars hauling hazardous materials because they could point terrorists to possible targets. That idea was scrapped after protests from firefighters who pointed out their lives depend on knowing what’s in a railcar in an accident.
The federal government has also shown no inclination to remove rules requiring railroads to accept hazardous shipments and at rates comparable to other cargo.
Fred Millar, a homeland security consultant in Washington, says telling the public of the dangers nearby only lets the public make decisions on whether to accept that risk. Hiding it from the public, he said, denies them that opportunity.
“Doesn’t it make you proud as an American that we can export democracy around the world, but we keep Americans in the dark about what’s moving through their cities?” Millar said.
Millar contends that if people knew of the tons of dangerous chemicals and explosives roaring past their children’s school or where they work, they would work to move them elsewhere. “It’s fair to say this is a completely underappreciated hazard,” he said.
Millar helped the Washington City Council devise a law banning railroads from moving the most dangerous materials through that city, a move that spurred both lawsuits from the railroads and similar proposals in six other cities. A federal court upheld Washington’s law, but the railroads have appealed.
In Washington, the catalyst was terrorism: Hazardous materials move on rails just blocks from the Capitol and the National Mall, where the government estimated 100,000 people could be killed within 30 minutes if terrorists struck during a large event.
Millar said Fort Wayne may not be the terrorist target Washington is, but an accidental release could be just as devastating.
“The basic consequences are the same – the chemicals act the same no matter how they get out,” Millar said.
Risk of release is small
The railroads insist the chances of an accidental release are remote.
“It’s as close to 100 percent (safe) as it probably could be, as far as hazardous materials being shipped without incident,” Norfolk Southern’s Husband said.
The Association of American Railroads, a national trade group for the industry, also says railroads are safe and getting safer.
Joseph Boardman, administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, pointed out recently that despite the enormous amounts of dangerous cargo on the nation’s rails, injuries and accidents are few.
There were 29 train accidents in 2004 where hazardous materials were million shipments of hazardous materials released, but those were among 1.7 That makes the risk of a release a tiny fraction of 1 percent.
But even one release can be catastrophic.
In January 2005, a Norfolk Southern train was mistakenly switched onto a siding in Graniteville, S.C., where it hit a parked train and ruptured a tanker car of deadly chlorine gas. Thousands were evacuated, hundreds were sickened and nine people died. Experts say if the crash had been during the day, the death toll would have been much higher.
The materials being hauled are so deadly and so voluminous that the railroads have asked Congress to either stop requiring them to carry them or limit their liability.
Wick Moorman, Norfolk Southern’s president and CEO, told a House subcommittee that his railroad wouldn’t carry the cargoes if it didn’t have to.
“Norfolk Southern does not make these highly hazardous materials. Norfolk Southern does not use these highly hazardous materials. And Norfolk Southern does not make enough money transporting these highly hazardous materials to justify the risks the federal government requires us to take,” Moorman testified. “The simple fact is we are putting our company at risk every single time we couple a carload of these highly hazardous materials to one of our trains – no matter how safely we operate.”
The risk is so high it may soon be uninsurable. Insurance executives testifying in the same hearing as Moorman said that few companies will write insurance for railroads because of the hazardous material risk. One more catastrophic loss could wipe out the railroad insurance industry completely, they said.
Many of the risks railroads carry come from factors outside their control, but those incidents do raise questions about the safety and security of the nation’s rail lines.
Spills recounted
Norfolk Southern’s Moorman complained to Congress about an Indiana derailment in Hagerstown, caused by a driver who drove around flashing signals and crossing gates, and an incident in Goshen where vandals were able to derail 11 railcars being stored there.
And accidents happen, as well. Parts fail, valves come open and cars leak. According to the National Response Center, a federal agency that serves as the national contact point for reporting all oil, chemical, radiation and biological releases into the environment, there have been 19 accidents involving railroads in Allen County since 2000.
Most of those spills have been motor oil or diesel from the locomotives, but in January 2003 a gallon of liquid magnesium chloride leaked out of a tank car with a loose cover in the rail yard. According to the federal Emergency Response Guide, used by first responders at hazardous material spills, magnesium chloride is an oxidizer that can explosively accelerate fires.
In 2000, 100 pounds of anhydrous ammonia leaked from a tank car’s hose in Huntington. Anhydrous ammonia, used as a farm fertilizer, can be fatal if inhaled, ingested or absorbed through the skin, and contact can also cause burns, the Emergency Response Guide says.
In September 2003 in Wabash County, an unknown amount of fuming sulfuric acid spilled out of a tank car from a defective rubber gasket. According to the response guide, sulfuric acid can cause severe injury, burns or death if it is inhaled, ingested or touched.
And according to a survey of railroad workers, the potential for many more incidents is great: A survey conducted by the Teamsters found that trains and their cargo are not secure, are often left unattended – even when hauling hazardous material – and that railroad police were often nowhere to be found. They also said they had not been trained in handling spills.
The Association of American Railroads blasted the survey, saying it “ignores the facts” and called it a self-serving union bargaining tactic. Specifically, they said the 62 percent of those surveyed who said they had not been trained on their company’s security plan “is absolutely false” because all employees receive that training and federal regulations require workers handling hazardous materials to get special training.
No quick change expected
The danger has some in Fort Wayne worried. Officer Michael Joyner, spokesman for the city police department, has for years watched tank cars sit near or roll past the Three Rivers Apartment high rises, the water filtration plant, the City County Building, the Allen County Jail and St. Joseph Hospital, and worried about what a leak or explosion would do.
“They’re just sitting there waiting for some disaster to happen,” Joyner said.
A disaster could wipe out the city’s water supply, cut off the main north-south routes through town, require the evacuation of prisoners, destroy the emergency communications center and even take out the hazardous materials response team at Fire Station No. 1 that would be needed for such an emergency. An explosion or fire could also render the burn unit at St. Joseph Hospital inaccessible or worse.
“You could in effect bring this whole city to its knees,” Joyner said. “The worst-case scenario is right here in Fort Wayne. … This would be one for the lesson books.”
The mayor agrees, to a point.
“Like so many issues, this is a complicated one,” Richard said. “When the city is well known for its rivers and its railroads, you obviously give a lot of thought to how we protect public safety and at the same time encourage commerce.”
So far, Richard said, the city’s response has been to give its first responders the best possible training and do all the planning possible in case something does happen.
In the meantime, the city is trying to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals that need to be here; recently it stopped using deadly chlorine gas at the sewage treatment plant in favor of something safer.
Bernie Beier, Fort Wayne-Allen County director of homeland security, said training in the city and county is top-notch, much to the credit of Norfolk Southern. He said that each summer the railroad trains first responders for a week at its own expense, working on not only hazardous materials training, but law enforcement and security issues as well.
The railroad also works with local officials when there is particularly dangerous cargo expected.
“Norfolk Southern has got a fairly tight working relationship with the city and county on the types of materials coming through,” Beier said. “There’s a very strong comfort level between our first responders and Norfolk Southern.”
Although local officials are not told what is on particular trains or given particular times, he said, they are told what materials come through on a regular basis. If there was something ultrahazardous that was expected during a major festival or some other event, Beier said, local officials would ask the railroad to re-route the material, though that has not been done, that he knows of.
Richard said he would consider asking the City Council to enact a ban on hazardous materials rolling through Fort Wayne on its way somewhere else but only after the Washington case works its way through the courts. And most likely, he said, that possibility would be used only as leverage to work with the railroads to find a solution so an outright ban was not needed.
“We’ll wait to see how the courts deal with that issue,” Richard said, since it may run afoul of the Interstate Commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. “Rerouting is really difficult because you have to have parallel track systems.”
Millar, the Washington consultant, said cities are gambling with the lives of their residents by allowing hazardous cargo on rails through town.
“This is bad stuff. Even in peacetime bringing it through major populated areas is just astonishingly reckless,” Millar said. “You’re just betting your city on this.”